On Dogs

I hate dogs. The big, hair shedding, slobbering, crotch nosing variety to the tiny yapping toys with sharp teeth, I hate them all. They sleep and defecate everywhere and when they are not doing that they are eating voraciously followed by throwing up on whatever expensive carpet or favorite item of clothing is nearest.

My daughter had a toy one. It was a straw colored mutt covered in unkempt hair and stumpy tail, the only way to determine which end was about to butt surf on your shoe.

When circumstances forced my wife and I to move into my daughter's fully disabled enabled home, the toy was going to be a major stress factor. Luckily my son, an Internet engineer in San Francisco, came to visit, fell in love with the dog and took it home.

When we moved in we discovered the cat. Cats I can live with, but I hate the way they treat me like staff. Nova was no different. It was found as a kitten inside an abandoned Chevy, hence the name. It was feral. Fully grown it had learned to tolerate humans as long as she was being fed. When I attempted to stroke its back, it showed me its ass. When I attempted to pick it up, it became a threshing ball of fur and claws aimed at my face. We agreed to leave each other alone.

This more or less peaceful hairball infused co-existence came to and end when my daughter decided she had to have another dog.

Our insanely tolerant son in law passed me in the driveway a day later. "The puppy's in the bathroom. It's really cute," he yelled.

I took a deep breath, cracked the bathroom door and peered inside. I recoiled in terror. It was looking up at me from amidst a sea of chewed up toiled paper and ripped a part towels. This is how I would feel suddenly staring up into the face of a monstrous Sasquatch somewhere in the Yukon. I quickly realized that, for now at least, the thing was too small to inflict serious damage to anything above my ankles.

I looked at the face again. The thing was all black, a ball of frizzy hair like I imagine the bride of Frankenstein looked after all that electricity before her hairdo. The face was fearsome, two large black eyes glinting at me with pure evil deep inside. The nose was wide and flat, set above cruel thin black lips above a pugnaciously jutting jaw. It grinned at me. Not in a nice way. The mouth was too large for the head and filled with pure white needle sharp baby teeth. I could tell then and there, it wanted blood.

The cat vanished. Hunger brought it back. The fights that ensured exhausted us. My wife was always in danger of being knocked off her feet. Whenever I attempted to separate the two I became engulfed in coarse black hair, fur, flying claws and sharpened nails. Given that I am taking blood thinners the result was not pretty. I looked like a fawn ravaged by rabid hyenas out on the Serengeti.

Weeks later I was mowing the front lawn and looked up at the glass porch door. The dog and the cat were standing behind the glass, shoulder to shoulder, looking at me with unblinking eyes. My knees shook. Clearly they had reached some kind of evil compact with a common goal in mind. I swear the cat grinned.

Matters did not improve when my son decided to visit his wife's parents in Japan for a month. We had to take the straw colored mutt back. It arrived being carried in an elegant canvass bag. We were shocked. The mess of unkempt yellow hair had been beautifully coiffed, trimmed, conditioned and perfumed. It had eyes. Big brown accusing eyes that immediately made me feel guilty for having failed to do something that her highness required of me. It seems she had acquired a few airs and graces in San Francisco.

After a few weeks of obligatory butt sniffing, fighting and stealing each other's food, the three seemed to agree on a new compact. Now the staff were never allowed to be out of their presence. I was assigned to Chiisai (Japanese for Little One). If I were to attempt to go anywhere without her, she would go ballistic. The only solution was to pick her up, tuck her under my right arm, and carry her everywhere. I thanked God I did not live in the Castro.

This plan to keep my wife and I under constant observation and availability reached a peak when all three decided it was necessary to sleep with us. Nova would claim a strategic high point on the pillows. Little Sasquatch would be at the bottom of the bed where she could pretend that toes under the sheets were Gophers that needed to have their heads bitten off.

Chiisai's job was to shoulder her way between my wife and I should we ever appear to be getting close. I think the idea was that there would be no new kittens or puppies to upset the equilibrium of 'the compact.' Of course, each had to leave the bed at two, three and four in the night for functions that required me to escort them into the front yard in my underwear for a few minutes. Our neighbors took their security cameras down. And I learned never to walk on the lawn in my bare feet.

I hate dogs. Cats too.